Loving His Aspie Son

Our noses were practically touching the wall. Tall, white, and seamless, it was the only thing standing between us and the president of the United States. “Stay right there,” a White House aide told me, my wife, and three children. “The president will be with you in a minute.” Suddenly, the wall opened; it was a hidden door to the Oval Office. “Come on in, Fournier!” shouted George W. Bush. “Who ya’ dragging in?”

It was my last day covering the White House for the Associated Press, and this 2003 visit was a courtesy that presidents traditionally afford departing correspondents. I introduced my wife, Lori, and two daughters, Holly and Abby, before turning to their 5-year-old brother. “Where’s Barney?” Tyler asked.

“He’s coming!” Bush replied as his Scottish terrier scampered into the room. “Let’s do a photo!”

As the most powerful man on Earth prepared to pose for a picture, my son launched into a one-sided conversation, firing off one choppy phrase after another with machine-gun delivery. “Scottish terriers are called Scotties, they originated from Scotland, they can be traced back to a single female named Splinter II, President Roosevelt had one, he called it Fala, Dad says he kept him in the office down there when he was swimming, there’s one in Monopoly, my favorite is the car …”

I cringed. Tyler is loving, charming, and brilliant—he has a photographic memory—but he lacks basic social skills. He doesn’t know when he’s being too loud or when he’s talking too much. He can’t read facial expressions to tell when somebody is sad, curious, or bored. He has a difficult time seeing how others view him. Tyler is what polite company calls awkward. I’ve watched adults respond to him with annoyed looks or pity. Bullies call him goofy, or worse.

But the president was enchanted. Waiting for Tyler to take a breath, he quickly changed the subject with a joke. “Look at your shoes,” Bush told Tyler while putting a hand on his shoulder and steering him toward the photographer. “They’re ugly. Just like your dad’s.” Tyler laughed.

Ten minutes later, we were walking out of the Oval Office when Bush grabbed me by the elbow. “Love that boy,” he said, holding my eyes.

I thought I understood what he meant. It took me years to realize my mistake.

My youngest son has some form of high functioning autism. Reading about your struggles with Matthew when he was younger and Mr. Fournier’s story regarding his son has really made me appreciate how fortunate my husband and I are in that we first realized something was wrong with him when he didn’t start talking when he was supposed to. A language delay is very unusual in kids with Aspergers but there it is. The rest of his symptoms are very subtle and all things considered he’s a pretty mild case so it may have taken us years to figure it out otherwise. I can only imagine how much harder it would have been to parent him if we had been in the dark about his condition.

I always remain somewhat puzzled by diagnoses like these (except for the most severely disabling autism end of things), not because I do not recognise or believe these individuals and characteristics, but because to me they seem like nothing new, and only factors in the modern world and culture that make them problematic.

In past generations it seemed like it was only the higher class families that put such pressures of conformity and performance onto their children, and even schools were structured better both socially and in greater allowance of independent study and progress for students to have breathing space to be “different”. Children are often overscheduled, overstimulated in so many neurologically recent and biologically abnormal ways, and the ones who engage truly and authentically with the world enough to “meltdown” are the crazy?

My own family is uncommonly full of asperger’s/autism freak-prodigy cases, and the generation aged 20 and younger has all the formal diagnoses and “treatments”, their parents fretting and suffocating them with overattention and concern, but in truth they are no different than the rest of us and our great grandparents have always been as long as anyone knows. When did “normal” or typical become such a dictatorial tyrant? Why must it be that the only way we can accept and accommodate differences is to label people, or give parents medicalised labels, that justify them?

Thanks for sharing this. I have a daughter with Cerebral Palsy who also exhibits several of these behaviors. She’s obsessively passionate about things she likes and hates/fears. She abruptly shifts nearly every conversation to those topics she’s passionate about (animals, BeyBlades) usually without any sort of contextual clues — as though she just assumes we’ve all been thinking about BeyBlades the whole time we’ve been discussing something completely different. She completely loses herself for hours copy-pasting images from the Internet into documents and drawing up little nonsensical charts about these things.

On the flip side of that coin of passion, if someone even mentions a fear of her’s (robots, butterflies, mannequins), she curls up and screams in terror– a behavior her siblings like to exploit from time to time.

She is extremely lacking in social graces, and we’ve not been able to teach her how to overcome that, even though her siblings who have presumable received the same upbringing are fairly well adjusted for their age.

This has led to a good deal of frustration and exasperation on my part. I know my novice diagnosis built from an Internet article or two is nigh worthless, but I’m glad to have read this as it gives me some info to pursue further.

I guess some of the burden parents feel is what I don’t understand. If my children don’t like the shower, if it is deafening and overwhelming to them, if the water from the showerhead actually starts to make their skin feel sore – then they can have baths. If they can’t stand the sound of each bubble of foam popping in the bubblebath, they can have plain water. Why is this trouble? Children can’t be allowed preferences?

If they gag on food textures like peas or corn, if they feel painfully uncomfortable eating certain food colours, if they can’t stand at night the flickering light at their bedroom window of the moon through the moving tree branches, if they wake up at every cat or raccoon that rustles through the yard or every owl kill or bats flapping, if they find certain light fixtures to have an uncomfortably intolerable whining buzz – these things can’t be accommodated? The child him/herself can’t be taught to problem solve and adjust the environment on his own?

If they talk like a robot when meeting strangers, if they recite facts that the stupid frivolous children don’t find as interesting as…whatever stupid frivolous children do find interesting, if sometimes they stare way too intensely in people’s eyes when talking to them, if at gatherings the other children abandon them and they end up hanging with the adults, so what? I honestly cannot understand.

I know there are certain cases much more severe. I have one adult cousin with autism who lives in a facility, and there have always been such. I just remember almost as a golden age the 1970’s when I was a child, and the weird older people(totally Asperger’s or something by today’s standards) who were just there in the community, accepted, lightly joked about (and who isn’t?), and looked out for; and the ways “strange” children were parented in an older fashioned easy, low stress kind of way, and because adults were easy about them then other children accepted them better too, and because other children were more accepting of them, then adults and parents did not freak out so much either. I am not convinced we are doing better by these children today, being so controlling and hyperinvolved at every level from parents to schools to doctors.

I cringed. Tyler is loving, charming, and brilliant—he has a photographic memory—but he lacks basic social skills.
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But Tyler didn’t like athletics, and he was terrible at it when forced to try. I know because I forced him.

Get that kid into engineering school, he’s a natural.

I’m only half kidding, when I read about the Asperger’s syndrome I keep thinking they should rename it Engineer’s syndrome.